New Website Tracks Deforestation in Near Real-Time

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Forests around the world are disappearing at an astonishing rate.
But now, these trees won't fall without a sound.

A new map and website called Global Forest Watch provides the
first near-real-time look at the planet's
forests, using a combination of satellite data and
user-generated reports. The website's developers hope that Global
Forest Watch will help local governments and companies combat
deforestation and save protected areas.

"More than half a billion people depend on [forests] for their
jobs, their food, their clean water," said Andrew Steer, the CEO
of the World Resources Institute (WRI), which launched the
website today (Feb. 20). "More than half of all terrestrial
biodiversity lives in forests."

But humans are failing to preserve these crucial ecosystems,
Steer told reporters before the launch. The equivalent of 50
soccer fields each minute have fallen every day of the past 13
years. [ See
Images of the New Deforestation Map ]

Monitoring forests

Until now, there has been no good way to keep track of this rapid
forest loss, leaving governments and organizations struggling to
provide solutions. One example is the food company Nestlé, which
committed to a zero- deforestation
policy in 2010. The company pledged not to buy supplies such as
palm oil from companies that clear-cut forested areas. Trying to
trace these ingredients to their source proved incredibly
difficult, said Duncan Pollard, the company's head of stakeholder
engagement in sustainability. The company tried to do the
research itself and ended up with reports full of rudimentary
maps more than five years out of date.

The new Global Forest Watch will update monthly at a medium
resolution with data from NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging
Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the Terra and Aqua satellites. The
resolution of these monthly updates is somewhat coarse, but every
year, the map updates with much finer-grained imagery from NASA's
Landsat program. Each pixel of Landsat data is roughly equivalent
to a baseball infield, said Nigel Sizer, the director of the WRI
Global Forest Initiative. That's 100 times finer than the monthly
updates, according to Sizer.

The fine-grained map comes from the work of Matt Hansen, a
geographer at the University of Maryland, and his colleagues, who
published the
first Landsat map of global deforestation last year. The WRI
and about 40 other partners, including Google, then got on board
to turn Hansen's map into something interactive and public.

At globalforestwatch.org,
users can scroll across the globe and zoom in on areas of loss
(and, more rarely, gain). Users of Google Maps will find the
format very familiar, given that the company was a major partner
in creating the website.

"If you can find a friend's address, you can easily use this
map," Sizer said.

The map reveals sobering data, including supposedly protected
areas that are nearly destroyed. Marahoué National Park in Côte
d'Ivoire in Africa shows up completely pink on the map view
— it has lost more than 90 percent of its trees despite its
national park status.

Users can draw on the map and receive updates about the outlined
region; in some areas, the map includes land use. In Indonesia,
users can see which palm oil companies are operating in which
areas. Before Global Forest Watch, no one had access to that
information, Sizer said.

The site also has a section for stories, which allows users to
submit news about areas that have been clear-cut or that are
threatened.

The goal is to continue improving Global Forest Watch with more
frequent data updates and algorithms that can differentiate
between native forests and plantations.

"We now have the possibility of doing something that would have
been absolutely unheard of 10 years ago," Steer said, "which is
near real-time data delivered to everybody who has a laptop, or a
computer, or a smartphone in the world."